"While world leaders were still celebrating the Paris climate agreement adopted at the UN climate change conference in Paris as a “major leap for mankind“, critical voices had already denounced the paper as “fraud“, “epic fail” and “trade agreement“. With this, they point to the discrepancy between the agreed commitment to hold the “increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels”, and the agreed real actions to actually achieve this commitment. To put it with George Monbiot, the deal is a miracle “by comparison to what it could have been” – and a desaster by comparison to “what it should have been”. He writes: “The real outcomes are likely to commit us to levels of climate breakdown that will be dangerous to all and lethal to some.”"

Published on Degrowth.de on 13 December 2015

This article is also available in German